Configuration

The Alquimia Platform runtime is configured through environment variables grouped into logical areas: runtime mode, authentication, storage, secrets, telemetry, and feature flags. This page explains the model; exact variable names and defaults live in the runtime repository.

Configuration areas

Runtime mode

The runtime can run as a master, a worker, or both in a single process:

Mode	Use
Master	HTTP API and registry management
Worker	Consumes events and executes agents
All	Both roles in one process; useful for local development

Authentication

The runtime supports several authentication methods:

API tokens for service-to-service calls.
JWT validated against a Keycloak or compatible OIDC issuer.
OIDC through Keycloak for user-facing endpoints.

See Authentication & authorization for the conceptual model.

Storage backends

Backend	Purpose	Common options
PostgreSQL	Persistent audit worklog and registry	Managed cloud Postgres
Redis	Session state, distributed locks, caches	Redis, KeyDB
Qdrant	Vector search for knowledge bases	Qdrant Cloud, self-hosted
S3 / MinIO	Blob storage for attachments	AWS S3, MinIO, Ceph

Secrets

Secrets are resolved at runtime from HashiCorp Vault or environment variables. Vault supports dynamic credentials for PostgreSQL and Redis, as well as static secrets for API keys, S3 credentials, and webhook signing keys.

Telemetry

OpenTelemetry is configured through standard OTLP endpoints for metrics, traces, and logs. See Observability for how the signals correlate.

Best practices

Keep secrets out of .env files in production; use Vault or your cluster’s secret store.
Run master and worker in separate deployments for independent scaling.
Set resource requests and limits on both roles.
Enable telemetry endpoints before going live so you have baseline metrics.